1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to architecting business operations for assessing enterprise technology, developing investment strategies, and improving business operations.
2. Background Art
Architecting tools are used in commercial industry to model planned business operations and functions. Architecting large scale business operations to a consistent and adequate level of detail for enabling informative decision making is only realized in the volume and complexity of the resulting products. The volume and complexity of these resulting products reduces the ability of stakeholders and architects to benefit by increasing the timeframe and cost to develop the products. This dilemma reduces the economic and effective usage of the resulting products and presents a paradox in current architecting environments.
Several conventional approaches are available for architecting and modeling business operations. For example, government-off-the-shelf (GOTS) and market leading commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) tools compete in the architecting market. Few of these architecting tools, however, accomplish more than providing a repository for architecture graphics and general data.
The focus of GOTS and COTS tools, for example, is to facilitate consistent architecture data entry and provide an interface to manually draw architecture products. Tools such as GOTS and COTS, however, are incapable of providing any real analysis capabilities. In most cases, any analysis capability that does exist simply facilitates production of categorized generic reports (i.e., raw data dumps of graphics and repository data).
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method to enable architects to efficiently assess enterprise technology, develop investment strategies, and improve business operations. What is also needed is a method and system to enable architects to work concurrently on the same raw materials to architect, for example, threaded business models.